This Website is a journaling site for the Atelierprojekt ‘Seen/Unseen’. Click any link in the table of contents to navigate directly to that section. Enjoy!

During the first week of classes in the summer semester, we went to the ‘Seen Around the World’ Symposium in Mainz. These three days consisted of many inspiring inputs by women and non-binary people working in graphic and type design. The first day commenced through a key note speech by Briar Levit. Every day focused on another continent: America, Europe and Asia/Australia. Overall, I really enjoyed the designers and their interviews. I wish there would have been more designers who were based and/or studied in Asia/Southern America as a lot of designers studied in the United States and Europe. This would have only enhanced the symposium.
To conclude my whole trip, I was really happy to attend the symposium and I loved exploring the cities Mainz and Wiesbaden. I will go back to Wiesbaden more often now!

On April 10, 2025, Savoie gave an interview at the UN/SEEN Symposium in Mainz about her experiences being a type designer as a woman. Here is the summary.

Alice Savoie is a type designer, researcher and teacher based in Lyon, France. She graduated from École Duperré and École Estienne in Paris. In addition, she holds a MA in Typeface Design and a PhD in type history from the University of Reading, UK. Between 2008 and 2010, she joined Monotype as an in-house designer, focusing on custom projects for international clients.
Her own typefaces include Faune, Capucine, Romain 20 and Lucette . From 2018–2021, she was the principal researcher on the Leverhulme-funded ‘Women in Type’ project at the University of Reading with Prof. Fiona Ross.
Currently, she teaches and supervises research projects at Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (Nancy), Écal (Lausanne) and EPHE (Paris Sorbonne). Besides her teaching, she also co-edits the Pamphlet collection at Poem editions with Jérôme Knebusch and is a member of Alphabettes and Atypi.

When being asked about her favorite typeface she designed, she said it was hard to decide as she is critical with her own work. Faune is a special typeface as it is based on the animal world.

The next question arose on where she draws inspiration from.
It depends on the context of the projects and is discussed in meetings with the clients. She likes to incorporate historical and nature references in her typefaces. The process of hand-sketching is an important step in the process of creating a new typeface. In addition, receiving feedback from clients is fundamental to the process. After this step, she moves on to a Font editor.

How has the visibility of women in the type industry changed in the last decades?
Especially in the last 15 years, the visibility has improved a lot. There has been a deficit in self-confidence in women in comparison to male type designers. However, nowadays women are taking on more risky roles.

What advice do you give to students who want to pursue a career in design?
Work hard, have fun and surround yourself with kind people.

What are some of your non-typographic influences?
The typeface Gloire (?) is inspired by a river. In one of her type classes, she tells the students to create a typeface based on shapes found in architecture, nature or their surroundings.

May 14th, 2025: These past weeks, I’ve been on a few walks to look for ‘invisible design’ based on Lucius Burckhardt's strollology. Today, I found something that might someday be invisible and is intriguing. I wrote the following paragraph summarizing the hike.

The birds were singing beautiful ballads, the sun was standing at its highest tip toes, the pavement was radiating and mirroring the heat of the sun. My skin was sticking to my white shirt. Whatever you do to prevent being sun burnt. I detected the counterpart of the Gateway to the West in St. Louis, Missouri. Ironically, I was walking West. It feels like second nature walking these roads.
Though, this time I found something I hadn’t seen before. Or have I seen it, yet never took a second glance? Has it always been like this or has it changed in all these years I’ve come here? The sign says “Zur Rehmühle” (to the deer’s mill). It has been pinned to the tree telling you the direction to a former restaurant, a so called ‘Wirtschaft’ in the woods. Perfect for hikers, yet closed down since before I was born. However, everyone in the small village I call home knows exactly what I mean. The house remains, for now under construction as it was built in 1930.
The tree must have been annoyed by the sign or perhaps captivated (or held captive?). It has grown and swallowed parts of the sign. It even parted into two trees. I can’t properly read the word underneath Rehmühle. Is it some kind of beer as the second word reads “Bräu”?
It serves as an artefact of a time of more livelihood in this village. Slowly growing over as though the place had never existed. As if the tree knew it was time to let go. Perhaps in a hundred years, the tales will be passed down like folklore.

The birds keep singing along
even after I have long been gone.

Christiane Feser is a German artist and photographer based in Frankfurt. From 1999 to 2006, she studied “Visual Communication”at the University of Art and Design in Offenbach and received her diploma in 2006 Diploma in Art. Since then, she’s working as an artist full-time.

Most of her artworks are based on these abstract-rhythmic compositions consisting of many paper-modules she cuts and folds herself. She then photographs, prints and then edits them again in order to create a transition from two- to three-dimensionality. In the article “Strenge und Spiel” (published in FAZ), she refers to photography as followed: “I want the frozen nature of photography to be overcome/vanquished/conquered”. She wants the viewer to be challenged. It’s even harder to understand when you’re not physically standing in front of one of her pieces.
A few of her series include ‘Partitionen’, ‘Nullpunkte’ and ‘Lamellen’.

Now, I highly encourage you to look at her website as she has an abundence of memorable and impressive artworks.

Presentation due May 20th, 2025

While researching for the “Seen/Unseen” topic, I tried to think of ways either I could shine light on a topic that should be discussed more or use a method that reveals/hides something profound in the process. Or perhaps even connecting the two.

I was looking for topics I had a connection to. I visited a few Nationalparks and State Parks last fall and was in awe of the beauty and vast diversity you encounter in just a few hours of driving (desert, forest, grass lands etc.).
These are places that should always be conserved and protected. However, recently 1000 parkrangers and people working in these parks have been fired and even more people took the indemnity payment orchestrated by Elon Musk. As a result, there are a dangerously low amount of people left to keep these parks clean, offer guided tours, manage camping grounds, preserve nature etc.

Another topic I was interested in was an inntrinsic one. I like writing, poems and texts, as a form of expressing myself. However, I’ve never shown anything I’ve written to anyone. That’s how I came up with the idea of revealing something of myself and connect it with a medium I see fitting.

Another approach to the topic is gathering methods of revealing/hiding. I was inspired by the collective Bye Bye Binary, and their approach to connecting words through ligatures to create gender neutral typefaces. This idea might lead to me connecting letters (or perhaps even words) and connecting them through an overarching theme.

Last semester, I participated in a class called “Cut&Fold”, in which we used paper as a form of expression. We used cutting and folding as a way to explore interesting shapes through paper. One task consisted of us receiving a small notebook and we were supposed to cut into them to create a cohesive and interesting structure inside. I wrote a small expression by cutting one letter on each page.
This, looking back, is the starting point of my concept for this semesters project. Thank you to Maria Seitz for giving us this task!

Now that I’ve decided to work on a personal topic, Indra recommended me to read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf. So, I went to the library and the book store to lend/buy the book in English. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a copy anywhere to be found. As a result, I wanted to design my own book. I’m currently in the process of finishing the layout etc. The next step is to design the book cover, print the pages and bind the book. I’d like to have a thread binding and a Swiss brochure.

I have written a poem called “The Negative” I would like to visualize. I won’t show the whole poem just yet. It’s a poem consisting of seven stanzas. I want to use it as a catalyst for typographical and photographic experiments. As I’ve stated in the section Topic Ideas, I base my visual execution on the notebook with one letter on each page. This led me to experiment with cutting out a few verses on a piece of paper. I realized there are a few rules I need to abide by in order to have great results. First, I need a typeface with either smaller than usual Ascenders and Descenders or I need to use Capitals. I decided on a mono-spaced typeface and I only use Capitals.

The next problem arose because of the counters (Punze in German) in letters. If I were to cut out the shape of the letters, I would also have to get rid of these counters, e.g. in the O, A, D, B. That’s when I figured I need to cut around the outline of each letter. But how do you keep these letters together if I only cut outlines? I did not want to use a single line in between each verse to keep them all together. Consequently, I reduced the line height so drastically, that there is no space between each verse. That’s how all the letters are connected. The result is an almost lace-like constellation of letters that stick together. Each letter is connected with another in the next verse and the verse prior.

Now that I’ve made all these typographic experiments and am happy with the results, I will disclose my next action plans. In order to fit the whole poem on the paper, I need to use a larger format (minimum A1). I need to uncover how I will differentiate all the stanzas from each other (Will I use a line in between them to keep them together? Should I use an indent in the first verse of the next stanza?). After printing, I will cut the poem myself which might take a while as it took me six hours for the A4 sheet. Hereafter, I will use light and darkness as a medium for photographic experiments in the realms of revealing and hiding. This experimental approach will lead to a documentation of a personal, revealing poem and result in a momento of hiding again. The name of the poem “The Negative” fits in perfectly with the theme of light/lack of light in the photo process as it is refering to the undeveloped photograph of an analogue camera. Maybe I can use an analogue camera as well as a digital one. After the process of documenting and editing the photos, I would like to showcase these pictures in a booklet/small publication. In the end of said publication, I would like to have the poem written as a full revelation.